Mobile City Council president forms committee of business leaders to look at budget

View full sizeMobile City Council President Reggie Copeland is appointing a committee to help break the budget impasse.

MOBILE, Alabama -- Citing the Mobile City Council’s apparent inability to resolve a financial crisis on its own, Council President Reggie Copeland announced Tuesday that he was appointing an advisory committee to help break the impasse.

Copeland was on vacation in Florida with is new bride, Jean Johnson, and absent from Tuesday’s council meeting. He delivered the announcement by letter.

The committee’s roster reads like a who’s who of well-connected business and political players, ranging from Michael Pierce, chairman of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce, to Elliott Maisel, president of Gulf Distributing, a regional giant in the beer business.

Despite the obvious political clout of the 12 people who Copeland named to the committee, Copeland said it was meant to be a nonpolitical body. The City Council Financial Advisory Committee will be a sounding board, "a nonpolitical, nonbiased body of business professionals that is open to consult with and support" council members as they grapple with the budget, he said.

Jones’ financial staff has forecast a deficit of $29 million in fiscal 2013. That figure is based on certain assumptions that have been called into question by the City Council.

Unable even to agree on the size of the budget shortfall, the elected officials have yet to come close to consensus as to how to solve it.

Jones has proposed raising the city’s sales tax from 4 cents on the dollar to 5, bringing the total sales tax rate in the city to 10 percent.

Copeland tasked the committee with parsing the city’s budget as well as the hundreds of pages of financial documents that Jones has made available in his back-and-forth with the City Council.

Once they’ve done that, the committee members are to:

Determine whether Jones’ forecasts are accurate.

Advise the council on additional questions regarding the budget.

Recommend possible efficiencies and budget cuts.

Determine the proper duration of any sales tax increase.

Bay Haas, a former Mobile County Commissioner and retired director of the Mobile Airport Authority, said he wasn’t taking any preconceived ideas or positions into the process.

"I’m going to sit and listen," he said.

Haas acknowledged that he and his fellow committee members are no strangers to the political world, so its natural that some might assume their advice will be based on connections they might have with either City Council members or the mayor’s office.

However, Haas said, he doesn’t think that will be an issue based on his relationship with some of the other committee members that he knows personally. "Everybody is interested in doing the right thing, getting this thing settled moving the city forward," he said.

"Anything to getting us toward consensus, I think it’s great," Burrell said. "Right now we are at an impasse."

Councilman John Williams, who has opposed a full 1 percentage point increase in the tax rate, said he agreed in spirit with the idea of an Advisory Committee, something he’s proposed in the past. Nevertheless, he said, Copeland went about it the wrong way.

The full City Council ought to have been allowed input in selecting the committee’s members, Williams said.

He said that Copeland doesn’t even have the authority to form a committee on his own.

For his part, Jones said that he isn’t opposed to the idea if it would move things forward.

Jones did say, however, that he has given the City Council more than enough information to make the decision on their own.

The full membership of the Advisory Committee is as follows: Michael Pierce, chairman of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce; Greg Saad, president of SAAD Development; Beverly Cooper, marketing director of Christian Benevolent Funeral Home; Elliott Maisel, president of Gulf Distributing; Sam Covert, an executive with Alabama Power; David Trent, site director for Airbus in Mobile; Karen Atchison, vice president of the Mobile Convention Center Board; Joe Bullard, president of Bullard Automotive; Bay Haas, former county commissioner and retired Airport Authority director; Daniel Dennis, president of Roberts Brothers; Tyrone Fenderson, president of Commonwealth Bank and chairman of the Mobile Downtown Alliance.